Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Adorable Lawn Fawn Tags

Guest designer Robyn Coburn here, with some sweet little tags made using the Lawn Fawn set "Believe in Yourself" and some paper from the "Sweater Weather" 6x6 inch petite paper pack. I love the small scale of the designs on these miniature paper stacks - they make me want to make miniature dioramas or tiny doll houses. These are the first two tags of what will be a few more, for a gift set for some students.

Other materials used: Color Box stamp pad, assorted bakers' twine (including some that came as Lawn Fawn packaging), markers and colored pencils, oval tags from Hampton Art (in the dollar section at Target!), and some buttons and scraps of craft foam (as risers) from my stash. I used Best Glue Ever, naturally, and the Embellie Gellie to help pick up and put down items, as well as Best Cleaner Ever and my Perfect Cleaning Cloth to clean the stamps.

By the way, I have several Perfect Cleaning Cloths, including one in my purse to clean my spectacles and phone screen, and in the bedside table for the same purpose, but this is the one I keep with my crafting tools. It has a fine, dense, short nap in comparison to other microfiber cloths, which helps it work better on those fragile surfaces, and stay soft with washing.

I happen to have a Cuttlebug, which requires an extra shim to use with these thin profile dies, but that was no problem. I stamped the cute jackalope on white heavy paper, then hand colored the images with marker and colored pencil. I used some washi tape to hold the die in place and ran it through my Cuttlebug. I had already run the die through a dark patterned paper to use for a "shadow".

The Lawn Fawn elements are small and delicate. It took me a couple of tries to line up the clear stamps on my acrylic block, until I recalled that I had a helpful grid printed right there on my work mat. Doh! I stamped the sentiments on to a mix of surfaces - colored paper and directly to the tag. (I like to dry my stamps instantly with the Perfect Crafting Pouch.) The sentiment stamps look pleasingly hand-written. Fussy cutting around stamped words really inspires
appreciation for coordinating dies.

All you need are tiny spots of Best Glue Ever

I glued some tiny pieces of craft foam to the back of the colored jackalopes. The orange one, I attached to the tag directly, while the pale pink I attached to the "shadow" cut. I allowed the BGE to sit and get a little tacky - which helps when attaching unlike materials, in this case paper and foam. Then I placed my tiny raised construction on the tag. I really like the shadowed look, and will do more of these tags with this method.

These tags are simple and the Lawn Fawn aesthetic is very clean, but I like a bit of embellishment, so I stacked a couple of buttons on the strings to attach the tags. The first time I ran my twine through the holes directly. This would have been fine if I was then placing the tags on another flat surface, like a card. But as soon as I tried to tie the tags to my gift bag, I realized my error. The buttons were being pushed over and flipping the tag upside-down.

Buttons poorly threaded (but the tags are so cute)

So I re-threaded one tail of the twine up-and-down through the button holes and tied the twine below the buttons. Much better!